One of the reasons why social behavior is so much harder to understand than other phenomena is that it has meaning, both for the actor and for the observer. This is particularly true of law, which is preeminently an expression of values. A central question in the social theory of law has therefore been: what is the normative meaning of law for social actors? The answer to that question is often influenced by the values which the theorist attributes to the law. Isaac Balbus, in his article in this issue, denominates two extreme responses as instrumental pluralism and instrumental marxism. The first perceives law under western liberal capitalism as an ideal harmonization of the values of all citizens. The second sees that law as pure exploitation, an instrument of naked ruling class domination. All of the writers in this issue reject both extremes. The relationship—between the values of social actor or analytic observer, and legal reality—is far more complex. That complexity is often expressed as the “relative” autonomy of law, although the phrase may be more elliptical than illuminating. The recognition that law is related to, but also partly autonomous from, both economic infrastructure and normative superstructure, is obviously the beginning of analysis, not the end. Perhaps the most important contribution of the articles that follow is their determination to study those relationships empirically, rather than deducing them from ideological presuppositions, as has so often been done in the past.

The convergence of the articles in this issue is the happy product of independent research upon two problems of widespread concern. Warren and Hiday examine civil commitment of the mentally ill in very different jurisdictions: urban California and rural North Carolina. Yet as Monahan suggests, in his synthetic overview, their data and analysis tend to point in similar directions. Steele surveys the literature on dispute processes and indicates how Hannigan, on the one hand, and Best and Andreasen, on the other, pursue complementary approaches to the study of consumer grievances and remedies. The present format has two advantages: the individual scholar retains the choice of topic and method, but research is still cumulative. I hope to encounter like conjunctions in the future.

Civil commitment recently has come to replace the insanity defense as the most controversial issue in mental health law. While the resident population of state mental hospitals has plummeted in the past decade, cries that commitment be abolished altogether are heard with no decrease in fervor. Many others feel that the pendulum has swung too far, that patients' rights and community care have been seized upon by fiscally conservative legislatures to cease providing any care at all to mentally disordered persons.

Models of the jury selection process in a Federal District Court are developed from court records, legal standards, and other information and then compared to determine sources of bias. The jury selection plan developed by the court has been operationally reformulated using 1970 census data to identify bias resulting from even a fair application of the plan. This normative model is also used to test for biases in the procedures and the results of the 1970 plan implementation in Eastern Massachusetts based on voter registration lists. Findings support the hypothesis that the juror selection process effectively discriminates against the poor, the young, racial minorities, women, and persons with low and high educational attainment. Sources of bias are found in the use of outdated voter registration lists, unreturned jury qualification questionnaires, and the excuse process. Recommendations are given for ways to reduce the extent of this bias.

This paper argues that American legal culture, specifically the complex of public attitudes toward our major legal institutions and values, is truly democratic. The most persistent, although often unexplained, theme in that complex of attitudes is the demand for equal treatment. Americans endorse the ideals of equal treatment and believe that the most glaring defect of the present legal system is its failure to provide such treatment. Yet, as de Tocqueville noted, our ideas of equality are often incomplete; the demand for equal treatment appears to be a demand for equality between oneself and those now accorded preferential treatment rather than a demand that those less favored be treated as well as oneself. Evidence in support of the argument is gathered from survey studies of public attitudes toward the police, lawyers, and courts as well as of their attitudes toward crime, punishment, and civil liberties.

The mobilization of law may be thought of as the process by which legal norms are invoked to regulate behavior. In the area of private law, mobilization has two distinct aspects. The first is the process by which existing disputes become engaged in the legal system. In theory this means that disputes are transferred from an arena where their resolution and the enforcement of resolutions depends on the relative power of the parties as enhanced or constrained by nongovernmental normative systems to an arena where disputes are resolved by reference to governmental (legal) norms and resolutions are enforced by the power of the state. In practice the separation between the governmental and nongovernmental spheres is rarely complete. Legal norms may influence the way in which parties resolve their disputes even when there is no threat that the matter will be taken to law, and both the parties' resources (Galanter, 1974, 1976) and nongovernmental norms“ clearly affect the way disputes are resolved in the legal system.

One hundred persons who were committed involuntarily to mental hospitals on 72-hour holds under California's Lanterman-Petris-Short Act (1967), and who filed writs of habeas corpus, were observed during petition hearings. Involuntary commitment criteria were frequently “bargained down” from dangerous to others, dangerous to self, and gravely disabled during the 72-hour hold to gravely disabled at the petition hearing. Most frequently used criteria for continued hospitalization as gravely disabled included prior hospitalization, refusal to take medication, and failure to cooperate with the hospital system. Persons adjudged dangeros to self were generally suicidal in action or talk. Although a minority of persons judged at the petition hearing to be dangerous to others were assaultive or threatening, evidence for the imminence and seriousness of dangerousness was not offered.

Prior to January 1974, jury selection procedures violating basic standards of randomness had resulted in juries in Erie County, New York, which were overwhelmingly male. This paper describes the biased selection procedures, their discovery by volunteers engaged in a project to ensure a fair trial for prison inmates under indictment for events occurring in the Attica uprising, and the consequences of both improved procedures and an amended law for sexual equality in jury selection.

Two linkages between law and society are explored. First, the existence of a “woman's exemption” had led the jury commissioner and staff to make systematic prejudgments about women's behavior which then resulted in their underrepresentation on juries. Second, lawyers and social scientists worked together, using procedures and concepts from both disciplines to achieve a goal of mutual interest: improvement of the methods of jury selection, so that jury composition would more closely resemble the composition of the community. Possibilities and problems of social scientists working with lawyers are described briefly.

This paper reviews existing empirical studies, finding that most have adopted an explicit or implicit model of legal need which is based solely on past use patterns. There is an absence of linkage between problem solving styles, uniqueness of problems, community networks of support, and concepts of social justice. The central problem confronting groups is how to convert their interests into some semblance of property interests or expectation. This invites legal change. Much of the past preoccupation with the problem of need conceals an absence of attention to crucial variables about quality of legal service, lawyer outlook and socialization, and the dynamics of the lawyer-client relationship. Lawyer perception may be as important, if not more important than client perception in determining the nature and scope of legal service. The author suggests, therefore, that any functional definition of legal need has to include a structural view of the legal profession.

Some aspects of the effects of the legal regulation in the socialist economy are discussed on the basis of interviews with two samples of managers of state enterprises in Poland. Emphasis is on the mode of adaptation by the managers to what they perceive as conflicting economic, legal, and administrative demands—especially in interactions between the enterprises. An attempt is made to specify the role played by the norm and mechanism of reciprocity, as well as by the other mutual sanctions that order economic cooperation, beyond the official legal regulations.

This paper discusses the major factors that appear to influence how clients and lawyers come together, and what role professional advertising might play in this process. The context for the discussion is the traditional model of appropriate lawyer-client relations, which is an ideal built into the code of professional conduct. The model presumes a lawyer's professional reputation, and the maintenance of professional standards by the bar. In the real world, conditions of legal practice and problem defining by consumers cause departure from the ideal. A number of factors influence how clients come to perceive problems as amenable to legal assistance. These are certain psychological, cultural, and social attributes whose operation in law is less well understood than it is in medicine. In addition, there are certain structural factors that influence the link between prospective clients and lawyers. Prominent among these is the fact that legal services comprise an imperfect market due to uncertainty of case outcome and difficulties of information procurement. It is suggested that consumers are reasonably rational in their search for lawyers given these problems. Consumers rely heavily upon informal contact networks and influential intermediaries, a process not unlike searching for a job or a doctor. The implications of these findings for opening up information channels through relaxation of the ban on advertising are discussed.

The experiences of 798 burglary and larceny defendants in the criminal courts of Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, in 1971 were studied to identify the factors having the greatest influence on the defendant's likelihood of emerging from court with an active prison sentence. The following variables were found to have a significant effect, listed in order of importance: (1) severity of offense (defined in terms of value of property taken and degree of skill required)—positive effect; (2) defendant's income—negative effect; (3) prior arrest record—positive effect; (4) strength of case against defendant as determined by promptness of arrest—positive effect. The influence of the defendant's sex could not be measured because there were too few females in the sample. Race, age, and employment were found to be of little or no importance. The four most important variables had a generally additive effect on prison probability.

Further analysis showed that the defendant's income affected not whether he was convicted of an offense, but the likelihood of going to prison after conviction. Most of this effect could be explained by the low-income defendant's poorer opportunity for pretrial release and greater likelihood of having a court-appointed rather than privately retained attorney. This suggests that the apparent disadvantage of the low-income defendant could be overcome by improvement of pretrial release and defense service.

The study's implications with regard to sentencing procedures are discussed. Judges' wide latitude in imposing sentence may enable the defendant's income to exert the large influence that it apparently does, but narrowing judicial discretion may not reduce the effect of income if present plea bargaining practices continue.

Studies in nations with different social and economic systems indicate that the norms of contract law are seldom applied through the litigation process and that disputes are avoided or settled where there is a long-term relationship between the parties. Yet legal scholarship, as well as many proposals for reform, continue to be based on a picture of the contracts lawsuit, to a great extent. It is likely that this distortion is prompted by overgeneralization from a nonrepresentative sample of possible and actual disputes, and by the indirect influence of legal norms; it may also express the needs of legal scholars and reformers. It is questionable whether capitalist, socialist, or mixed economic systems would benefit if more disputes were resolved by the application of officially sanctioned contract norms.

Court proceedings and records were analyzed to evaluate statutory reform of mental commitment procedure in one state with a typical statute. A marked improvement over practice described in previous research was found: court proceedings were not rapid and perfunctory. However, the court still often deferred to psychiatric opinion even when a preponderance of evidence showed it to be unsubstantiated.